Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Open Post to Rich

Looks like you 2 are good at keeping your costs down. I have two questions: 1) How are you doing in the 1999 without a slide? 2) How does your budget look?? we want to go fulltime, have to decide on type of MH will have under 4000.mo income. Can we do it??

Rich, first of all you need to ask yourself (and spouse) if you are looking for an adventure or a change of life style. Adventures look toward constant travels crisscrossing the nation with or without travel plans. Life style changers down size their cost of living by looking for RV parks that offer affordable sites that offer all the necessary hook ups at one monthly price and usually stay put for long periods of time.

Rich you stated that you will have around $4,000 a month to work with and in our opinion that is quite a bit. Set your budget at $1,500 to $2,000 a month and bank the rest in a savings account that you would have to actually go to the bank to withdraw any of it.

Our MH is a 1990 35 foot Georgie Boy without slides and this hasn’t affected our getting around inside it. In our opinion slides offer more room for foot traffic, slides are mechanical which means it’s just something else that can become a problem. Oh something else, we paid cash for our MH, do the same if possible.

Our budget is as simple as we can get we chose to live on $1,000 a month we bank the rest. We will show our fixed costs first. Our RV park site cost us $300 a month. With that we get water, cable, internet connections, sewer, garbage pick up and 50 amp electricity. We have two cell phones under one plan at a cost of $35 a month. Full coverage on our vehicle and RV runs about $412 for six months so we stick back $68 a month to cover that. Our tags cost us $166 a year so we stick back $14 a month for those.

If you have been keeping up with our expenses so far you will notice we still have $583 to work with. How can we make the month on what’s left? We can control how we spend the $583.

We plan to remain here for a few years so the park owner let us place a 120 gallon LP tank next to our RV. We get the LP tank filled by an off site gas company as needed for almost a dollar a gallon less than the RV park sells it for. Also we don’t have to move the RV when we need LP gas. We cut our LP gas expenses even more by using a toaster oven to bake / broil in and a two burner electric hot plate for stove top cooking. We use one electric heater in the living room and one in the bathroom. Our average LP cost is $37 a month.

Cloths: We have a rule. If I buy a shirt then I have to throw a shirt out. If she buys a new sweater she has to throw out a sweater. Always pay cash.

Food: Eat at home 28 days of the month. Eat before you go shopping for food. Always pay cash.

Everything else: Is it a need or a want? Always pay cash.

Always pay cash! Why? There are no fees or interest when you pay with cash!